Today I received a rather rude email from someone who volunteers their time to moderate the Wikipedia pages. I have contributed a few things over the years, but recently I created a page for a TV show which for some reason hadn’t had its own page yet.

The email was to tell me that despite the TV show having run for two series it was not notable enough to have its own page, which is a ridiculous reason because there are hundreds of thousands of TV shows that have been running for less episodes and have received less viewers and have their own pages.

I put this to him and he replied by telling me this was a pathetic excuse and then said that he is surprised I managed to have any of my contributions accepted if this was the normal level of contributions that I put forward.

Is being up your own arse a criteria that Wikipedia looks for when hiring volunteers? I have not spoken to one that doesn’t believe that they are better than everyone because they have a little bit of power on one of the biggest websites on the internet.

Are they like this all the time? Do they go home and say to their wives/husbands (they MIGHT have partners) and say “Diane/George, I’m afraid that dinner was not up to standard so I shall have to delete you.”

The temptation to continue to argue with this person, who obviously has a Napoleon Complex, was very strong, but I resisted, I’ve got bigger and better things to be getting on with than arguing with someone like that.

Photo by Svilen Milev from FreeImages